


The Man In Blue

by orphan_account



Category: Ib (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Brotp, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-23
Updated: 2017-07-23
Packaged: 2018-12-05 17:40:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11582991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: There was a sense of safety in the image. Of familiarity, of warmth. As if she weren't looking at a being of fiction when she stared into the canvas, but at someone she knew. A friend, or maybe a brother. Someone she cared about.Someone she missed.





	The Man In Blue

 Her apartment was coated in blue. 

It didn't take much time for her projects to eat away at every available space. Canvas after canvas sat before her in turn, blank slates for her to paint on. Vibrant flowers against a matching background, falling petals scattered to the open air, and always, always the same man.

Tall with flowing hair, a ratty jacket that fell down toward his ankles. His eyes were closed in gentle sleep, though she knew that they would be blue as well, just as everything else was.

The color seeped into everything she owned, surrounding her, smothering her like waves in the ocean. When she wasn't at work, earning the money to pay for this place, she was here, brush in hand, adding to the ever growing pile. She couldn't tell you when this started. Memories of childhood were faded and blurry, dulled further still by nightmares. Nightmares of awful, screeching beasts in blinding red, green, and yellow, the sound of echoing footsteps without the hope of escape, a sharp contrast to the quiet melancholy that ruled her life as an adult.

It'd been a long time since she'd spoken to her parents. Longer still since she'd tried to maintain any semblance of friendship in anything that wasn't work related.

Sometimes, late at night, she supposed she should contact them. She should try and move on from this. Move on from what, though? From painting? No, she needed it. When she wasn't sitting in front of a canvas, she wanted to be. 

The subject of her every creation wasn't unknown to her. While she doesn't remember the first time she'd put his likeness on paper, she knew where the original piece was. The man came from an art gallery, a painting done by Guertena. Most of his art came with a story, a reason why it was made, but not this one. This one had nothing, and simply existed. It didn't even have a proper name.

Like her depictions, what hung in the gallery was a framed portrait of a man, sitting on the ground, resting amid a series of blue flowers.

She'd studied the painting, both her own copies of it and of the original. Every line, every petal, every blurred color. She studied the man's position and the way he slouched against the wall.

And although she knew he was sleeping, knew and believed in that with all her heart, a nagging part of her thought, perhaps, he wasn't. 

It hurt her more than it should. 

There was a sense of safety in the image. Of familiarity, of warmth. As if she weren't looking at a being of fiction when she stared into the blue coated canvas, but at someone she knew. A friend, or maybe a brother. Someone she cared about.

Someone she missed.

It wasn't something she could explain. Maybe this was all a product of those nightmares she'd had as a kid. Maybe it was unrelated. 

Maybe.

The image made her chest ache, and so she recreated it anew. As if another version of the same scene would offer her an answer, a reason for how she felt. As if she could understand Guertena's reasoning for creating it, since he himself gave none. As if there was some sort of relief to be had in coating everything she had in blue. 

She tried to paint him with open eyes, to make a change to the scene, but she'd only ever make it half way until it started feeling off. She tried to depict him standing up, smiling, anything, and she couldn't.

She knew he liked candy. She knew he smelled like smoke. She knew he was warm and that his coat was coarse to the touch.

She held a lighter in her hand, old and half rusted, empty of fluid, and she knew he used something similar. 

It was strange that she had a lighter at all. Cigarettes weren't a past time of hers, and her parents wouldn't have allowed such things in the house, anyway. There was no reason she should have it in her position now, nor know it as a relic of her childhood. There was no reason that the lighter should make her feel the same way the paintings did.

Ib felt like she was forgetting something, and perhaps that was the reason she mourned for the man in blue. 


End file.
